Safety from the Storm
by Souffles In Space
Summary: Being invisible is a lonely existence. Maybe they can tough it out together. / Or: Jack wasn't the only one to drown that night. AU drabbles and oneshots; major spoilers; gen. Based on art by seekingskywhales on Tumblr.
1. footprints in fresh snow: part 1

**Disclaimer:** _Rise of the Guardians_ © Dreamworks - Full disclaimer on my profile.

**Summary:** Being invisible is a lonely existence. Maybe they can tough it out together. / Or: Jack wasn't the only one to drown that night. AU drabbles; major spoilers; gen. Based on art by suddenlysencha on Tumblr.

**A/N:** Okay, I saw the art by _suddenlysencha_ (Tumblr) and couldn't resist (I made sure to get her permission first). An example of said art is being used as the cover (also with her kind permission). This won't be a well-thought-out, multi-chaptered fic, I'm afraid - just a series of drabbles, some of them taking on events in the film and some in-between, before or after. Probably not in chronological order. Maybe I'll take prompts/requests later on, too, if anyone's becomes interested.

This one was surprisingly hard to write, considering a lot of it is lifted straight from the film - and I'm sorry about that, but this being the introductory drabble, it was necessary.

Expect slow, sporadic updates.

* * *

**Safety from the Storm**  
**~ROTG~**

* * *

**footprints in fresh snow: part 1**

* * *

Darkness. That was the first thing he knew.

It was dark. It was cold.

He was scared.

That vice-like fear gripped him suddenly enough to make him gasp - and then he was aware that he wasn't inhaling air. _Water._ He was full of water - it was in his lungs and his eyes and somewhere, in the back of his mind, he knew that this should have bothered him.

His limbs twitched; his eyelids fluttered apart. His movements were groggy, hampered by the water that seemed to be everywhere. It blurred his vision, but he thought...no, that was a sheet of ice, muting what seemed to be moonlight. Was he just beneath the surface? The shadows congealing in his peripheral vision frightened him; his breath spiked again.

Then the ice broke, cracks creating web-like patterns through which bled the moonlight. It fell across his face, scattered the shadows.

And with them, the fear.

Suddenly, he didn't feel cold anymore - or, at least, the cold ceased to bother him. As if a weight had left him, or a gentle hand had taken his, he found himself rising towards the surface; he was lifted up up up into the crisp night air and drank it in greedily, chucks of ice falling away from his body. The water on his skin and clothes turned to paper-thin layers of frost that crackled and broke when he moved.

The moon was bright and full, all-encompassing - it was all the boy could do not to fall into its silvery depths. He couldn't look away.

_Faith. Frost._

Not his words - the moon's.

Faith. Frost.

What did they mean?

Slowly, he was deposited onto the ice, which resealed beneath him. His thought processes were picking up speed; as he gulped down air, he blinked down at his hands (pale, with a very light dusting of freckles and long, thin fingers), patted his chest to reassure himself that he was all in one piece (yes, he was very definitely _there_ beneath the coarse, brown fabric of his clothes) and took stock of what he knew of his existence.

One: he felt _empty_.

It wasn't hunger or thirst. It was a strange, aching hollowness in his chest that told him he was missing _something_ - but for the life of him, couldn't figure out or remember _what_.

Which lead to number two: he couldn't remember anything.

Well, that wasn't strictly true. He could remember names and meanings. Faith - believing in something. Frost - ice crystals. How did they fit together? He remembered that the moon was called the moon, and that it was Winter (it _must_ have been Winter, why else would the lake be frozen?). It struck him as odd that he couldn't attach any past experience to knowing these things - the earliest thing he could remember was the dazed beginnings of consciousness in the water just minutes ago. He could remember the names of objects (_that_ was a tree, and _that_ was the sky, and _this_ was a shirt he was wearing) - so why couldn't he remember his own name? Why couldn't he remember his _life_?

Only one logical solution came to mind - he hadn't had one until just now. But someone had to have put him there, right? He looked back to the sky, to the comforting presence of the moon, and -

_Of course._ The moon. Who else?

Still half-entranced by it, the boy took a tentative step forward, skidded slightly and flailed to regain his footing (his feet were bare and he was dimly aware that the ice against his bare skin should have been hurting him); another step, and his toes nudged something wooden. A staff - a shepherd's crook. He nudged it again. A sheen of frost spread across it. Curiosity piqued, he picked it up and weighed it in his hands. It felt right. As if it belonged with him.

So why did he still feel as if something were missing?

He rolled the staff carelessly over his hands - accidentally tipping it off in the process. He caught it just as the end rebounded against the frozen lake and sent whorls of frost dancing across the surface. The boy stared.

_Woah._

Someone gasped.

The sound startled him into action - he dropped into a defensive stance, throwing his head around in an attempt to pinpoint the source of the noise. Was someone spying on him? He gripped the staff in front of his as a shield without thinking, a natural extension of his body, as if he'd been using it for years.

Nothing. Just moonlight and snow. Wary now, the boy cleared his throat and tried out his voice for the first time: "H-hello?" It sounded too loud in the stillness of the wood around him, too deep, too weak. He cleared his throat. "Is someone there?" he said, more strongly this time. "I...I won't hurt you. I promise. Whoever you are."

A moment of silence, then the crunch of footfalls compressing snow - a little girl peered around the trunk of a great, bare tree. She can't have been older than eight. The eye that the boy could see was blue and clear as cut diamond, and wide with what looked like awe; her shoulder-length hair was startlingly white. Her skin seemed to be the same pale shade as the boy's and even her clothes looked to have been cut from the same cloth.

"Jack...?" she whispered.

Faith. Frost.

Faith Frost.

Suddenly, they came together in the boy's mind: _Faith Frost._ Not two words, but a name. _Her_ name.

"Faith," he breathed - just as the girl ran and tumbled into Jack's arms.

* * *

**~ROTG~**

* * *

**A/N:** I forgot to mention - when it comes to me, 'drabbles' tend to be, er, anywhere between 50 and 1,000 words. Heheh. The next few probably won't be quite so long.

Constructive criticism welcome.


	2. footprints in fresh snow: part 2

**A/N:** Wow okay this is still pretty long. I seem incapable of writing something short. Expect further "drabbles" to be anywhere up to 1,000 (and I'll try not to exceed 1,000). This part barely missed 1,000.

Thank you to those who favourited and subscribed to this story, and special thanks to those who reviewed!

** Katie / MelTheAngryVegan:** Thank you! I don't think she's called Pippa either - the only reason some people call her that is that she and Pippa (Jamie's friend) share the same voice actress. And I didn't want to call her Emma. I guess I'm just contrary. I chose Faith because the name was in use in the 17th century, and because it's a pretty name that just fits, considering the whole film is about believing.

P.S. I should probably warn you - if there's an odd-looking spelling, word or phrase in this fic, it will either be a) a typo (feel free to point those out) or b) an Englishism (feel free to ask me to clarify if it's a really obscure one).

This chapter was beta'd by my brother, spacemen-with-space-teef (Tumblr).

* * *

**footprints in fresh snow: part 2**

* * *

"...and then I saw _you_."

Cross-legged in a snowdrift beside the frozen lake, Faith had just been regaling Jack Frost with the tale of her first memory - which was less than thirty minutes old, like Jack's.

("Jack Frost" had been the name that the moon had given her, just as it had given him Faith's, and Jack saw no reason to argue.)

Not long before Jack had left the water, Faith had first discovered herself waking up beneath the surface of the lake, rising up through the ice. Minutes later, the ice had begun to crack again, startling Faith into darting behind the great tree.

"You floated out, and you have white hair like me," she continued, holding her ankles. For some reason, she wore ice skates - she claimed to have woken up wearing them. She twisted a long, silver-white lock of hair around her finger. (This was news. Jack made a mental note to find a mirror later.) "And I knew you were Jack. What you did with that staff was really pretty."

"What, this?" Flashing a smile, Jack plucked his staff from by his feet and lightly tapped the crooked head against the protruding root of a tree. Fern-patterned frost danced across it. Faith giggled.

"Can I try?"

Truth be told, he wasn't exactly sure why he trusted her so implicitly, so quickly - even with their similar names and hair, he'd only known her for half an hour at most. Still, he handed her the staff without a second thought. It was almost twice as tall as she was but she managed to clumsily maneuver it so that she could touch it to one of the other trees.

Nothing happened. Faith's eyebrows pulled together - she tapped the tree with more force, to no avail. Obviously frustrated, she drew the staff back to bang it against the trunk.

"Woah! _Woah._ Slow down, kid." Jack's hand snatched at the staff. "I've got a feeling this thing's limited edition."

"But why isn't it _working_?"

Faith shoved the staff away from her and crossed her arms, pouting. Jack might have chuckled at how adorably she wore it - except that when she turned her head, he thought he saw something clear fall from the corner of her eye. Jack pursed his lips for a moment before stretching them into a grin, grabbing Faith's hand and helping her to her feet where she teetered slightly on the blades of her skates. "Jack?"

"Hold on tight," he said - then launched himself at the lake with Faith behind him.

Faith squealed as Jack sprinted across the surface - skidding slightly at first but steadying as he gained momentum, trailing his staff along the smooth surface so that more frost patterns blossomed across it. Faith slid easily alongside him and her squeals quickly became laughter as her previous mood dissipated entirely. Jack cheered, turning circles and kicking up ice crystals. The two of them danced with reckless abandon -

An errant burst of wintry wind thrust them into the air.

"Wo-oah!" Caught unawares, Jack instinctively gripped Faith's hands tighter. She shrieked as they suddenly found themselves tumbling under and over and upwards and -

"**_Jack!_**"

_Stop stop stop **STOP** -_

The two halted abruptly, high above the treetops. For a few moments they wobbled unsteadily in mid-air, staring at each other in shock.

It hit them simultaneously.

_They were **flying**._

"Jack! Jack, look!" Faith shook him and jabbed a finger at the view below. The lake was covered in feathery frost patterns, not all of them Jack's. He traced some of them with his eyes - they looked as if they'd followed Faith's dancing path across the ice. She looked delighted, blue eyes sparkling - it warmed Jack's heart to see it. Smirking, he let go of Faith to applaud.

He didn't count on losing altitude the second he lost contact of her hand. Jack cried out as, without warning, he fell face-first into the unforgiving branch of a tree - then again and again until he finally came to a stop against a thicker branch, his arms and legs sprawled over either side and his cheek pressed hard against it. He blinked, slightly dazed. "Faith?"

A pause, then: "'M okay." Jack followed the voice to the top of the next tree where Faith clung to a branch, slightly shaken but unhurt. Jack righted himself. A cluster of lights in his peripheral vision snagged his attention - a closer look revealed the vague, distant silhouettes of houses gathered in a forest clearing. A village...? Come to think of it, Jack had no idea where he and Faith actually were - he supposed that village would be as good a place as any to find out.

Jack clambered swiftly along to Faith's tree and up the branches, and offered his back to her. She raised her eyebrows. "C'mon, I promise not to drop you. Oop!" He quickly hoisted her onto his back; she wrapped her arms around his neck.

"Where are we going?"

"Over there. We're gonna find out what we're doing here. You ready?"

Jack bent his knees, took a deep breath and sprung - yes, that's the most apt description; the air rushed from his lungs as he propelled them higher into the air than any human had any right to go and Faith tightened her grip on his neck to a near chokehold. They stayed airborne for just a few minutes before Jack lost his balance in the air and tipped over - by some miracle, he managed to land on his feet when he hit ground, but stumbled. He felt Faith trembling slightly against his back so made a show of it, waving his leg and exclaiming dramatically. She giggled.

Slowly, in fits and starts - some longer or more successful than other - Jack and Faith approached the village and the answers it held.

* * *

**~ROTG~**

* * *

**A/N:** I'm not doing these characters justice. I'll give Faith an actual personality in further drabbles, I promise.


	3. footprints in fresh snow: part 3

**Guest:** Yes, Jack and Faith can only fly when touching each other. Through clothes counts (hey, if people can walk through Jack _and_ his clothes as if they're a part of him, I think that this is an acceptable loophole). I figure that if they're the Frost siblings, they'd be ~magically connected~ somehow, and if they're connected then it makes sense for their powers to be linked or dependent on the others'. I'm sorry that I've not made that very clear yet.

* * *

**footprints in fresh snow: part 3**

* * *

Jack would like to have been able to claim that he and Faith took to flying like proverbial ducks to water. He would have loved to say that, after perhaps a few tiny hiccups, he was riding on air currents with the grace of a bird - as if the weight of his sister on his back was nothing (which it almost wasn't, to be fair - she barely weighed anything).

In reality, it was less like '_a few hiccups_' and more like a relentless coughing fit. Jack tripped and stumbled in the air, landed face-first twice and almost dropped Faith three times. Still, the pair eventually found their way to the edge of the cluster of houses - a quaint village constructed mostly of wood and illuminated by small fires. Even at this late hour there were people milling about of various ages and outfits (though most wore the same uniform shade of brown), and none of them seemed at all perturbed by the sudden appearance of two quasi-airborne, white-haired children.

Jack interpreted this as a good sign.

After pushing himself to his feet, untangling himself from his cloak and giving Faith a swift check-over, he and Faith took each others' hands, offered each other encouraging smiles and ventured a little bit further into the village. They passed two bearded men in heated debate ("...Sarah's mutton is nice, James, but let's face it, my Martha cooks the best mutton in this settlement." "You listen to me, I'll have _no one_ put down my Sarah's cooking..."), an elderly couple comforting a frantic woman with a baby in her arms ("...can't have gone far, he promised he'd look after her, he'd never let _anything_ happen to -" "It's been several days, Mary. The men've searched for them as long as they've been able to spare the time. I'm sorry..."), and a young man strumming a gentle tune on a guitar to the delight of two children.

"Hello!" Jack greeted a passing woman cheerfully and Faith put on what she hoped was a winning smile, but the woman didn't even glance up. Maybe she had someplace urgent to go? "Hello?" The seated couple didn't respond either. Jack and Faith exchanged bewildered glances.

Faith cleared her throat. "Hey, mister?" No answer - he ignored them entirely. Faith's eyes narrowed slightly. She let go of Jack and marched up to him. "_Mister._ Hey! _Look_ at us!"

Frustrated, Faith reached out to tug at the man's sleeve.

Her hand passed straight through him.

Faith inhaled sharply, her hand snapping to her chest to be cradled by the other; she reeled backwards and Jack automatically knelt to catch her, staring dumbly at the man, who continued his hushed conversation as if nothing had just happened. How - ?

A dog charged Jack with a little boy at his heels; they ran through Jack as if he were nothing more than air. Jack gasped, snapping upright. The sensation of them ghosting through him - it chilled him deep to the bone and further still, gripping his lungs and _squeezing_.

Faith and Jack groped blindly for each other's hands again and clung to each other for dear life as two more people breezed through them.

"H-hello?" Jack's voice hitched, cracked and rose, edged with panic. "Can anyone... Hello?!"

He may as well have been mute. They may as well have been invisible.

No - they _were_ invisible. More than that, they were nearly incorporeal. But...but what sense did that make? Jack's fingers tightened around Faith's, and around the staff in his other hand. He could hold _her_, he could hold _it_. He felt the grit between his bare toes and the solid material of his clothes brushing his skin, and he'd felt the chunks of ice as they'd fallen from his rising body. Yes - he and Faith were definitely solid.

_Not solid enough._

Faith tugged on his arm and spoke in a small voice. "Are we dead?"

"I don't know," he answered weakly.

For the first time in his short life - but definitely not the last - he felt utterly, hopelessly lost.

.

.

.

.

.

His name was Jack Frost. Her name was Faith Frost.

They knew that because moon told them. It was all he ever told them for a long, long time, after pushing them headfirst into the deep end of a world that neither heard, saw, nor cared.

But they had each other. For now, that would have to be enough.

* * *

**~ROTG~**


	4. hushaby mountain

**A/N:** ...Sorry doesn't cut it after four months without an update, doesn't it?

Instead of me saying "sorry" a few dozen times (which I might do anyway - I really am sorry), I'll give you this drabble and the promise of another before the week is out. I will also apologise again in advance as whilst the four month lull was just pure laziness on my part, I've got a busy summer and then college year ahead of me. Less time for writing, even if I could gather enough self-motivation to keep me writing long enough for regular, quick updates.

* * *

**hushaby mountain**

* * *

It was two long days after their life-shattering discovery in the village before Faith managed to pull Jack out of his wallowing.

To say that he hadn't taken being invisible well was a gross understatement. He'd retreated into the dark recesses of the woods, the playful personality Faith had seen early on shrinking behind a depressed stupor. It scared Faith; the sadness looked wrong on his face, but far too comfortable there, creating lines that didn't belong. Finally - after alternating between giving him space, pleading upon deaf ears and even snapping at him at one point - she simply planted herself in his lap, hooked her arms around his neck and said:

"Jack, please. I _need_ you."

That snapped him back to reality.

Still, he didn't smile again - not a genuine smile, she could tell - until the Dream Man came later that night.

Jack had discovered, quite accidentally, that he could will the snow to do his bidding as much as he could with ice; he was practising, moulding it into shaky, crude sculptures of birds and forest animals, when Faith (who'd been watching his efforts) squealed and snatched at his sleeve, pointing above the village - Burgess. "_Look!_"

Jack did, and what he saw erased the bleakness from his expression.

Above Burgess, golden trails of light were beginning to spiral down from the clouded night sky. They shimmered in the air like swirls of stardust - no, sundust; particles of breathtaking gold dancing from the clouds and branching off in every direction, slipping through windows and doors.

This was not in their knowledge; the Moon hadn't put anything about this in their heads.

Jack _laughed_.

It was breathy, but a genuine laugh nonetheless, his eyes fixed on the spectacle. Faith peeked at him from behind her curtain of snowy hair, feeling her heart lift; his sparkling smile outshone the golden dust, as far as she was concerned, bursting to life as the clouds cleared from his expression as if the last two days had never happened at all. She began to laugh, too.

"What _are_ they?"

"Dunno. Wanna find out?"

Faith jumped clumsily to her skate-clad feet (wobbling only for a few seconds on the thin blades), nodded excitedly and clambered onto Jack's back. Jack's flying was still shaky. He shifted his feet to a wider stance and give himself a stronger launch - wiggled slightly to make Faith giggle - and pushed off into the gold-grey sky. The wind nipped playfully at Faith's cheeks as she and her brother soared upwards, towards the nearest twist of light.

Hovering in place, Jack smiled encouragingly at Faith; his pale face and hair was highlighted with gold. She reached out a hand - hesitated - touched it once.

Flowers burst from the stream - dazzling floral fireworks that tumbled and danced around her head. Faith gasped, stars twinkling in her wide eyes, trying to twist to follow them with her eyes.

Jack couldn't bounce - not in mid-air - but Faith felt him humming with excited energy. He thrust his hand into the stream, conjuring yellow snowflakes which drifted gently downwards before dissipating.

The stream was snaking in through the window of one of the many wooden huts of Burgess. Without warning, Jack jettisoned down after it, sticking close to the dust; Faith trailed her hand through the stream as they went, kicking up flowers behind them like sand. The dust passed through the glass window as if it were air, though it resisted Jack's hand, which created a light coating of frost crystals where he's pressed it against the pane.

The stream split in half - the twin streams each stopped over one of the two children occupying the room. Over the youngest (a boy, perhaps six or seven years old), it formed an animated image of kids clambering up a tree; over the other, older boy, an image of a kid being cradled in arms of a giant, bearded man, surrounded by winged women. The children wore small, content smiles.

"They're dreaming," Jack realised. _Dreaming_. What was that like, he wondered? It was just a concept to him, like sleep - he and Faith hadn't slept since their birth at the pond, and he suspected that they didn't need to.

"Where is it from?" Faith asked hopefully. "Can we see?"

Jack pulled away from the window and rocketed upwards, tracing the dust back to the source - past the tops of the trees, past the first few layers of clouds...

_There!_

A cloud of the golden dust had congealed in the air, from which the streams came. The impossible cloud supported a portly, short man, shorter than Faith even, who almost seemed to be made from the dust himself. His body was round, his face squat with a snub nose and his eyes, even from a distance, looked kind; tendrils of his hair, the same gold hues as the rest of him, stuck out around his head haphazardly.

He was the most bizarre thing that they'd seen in their short life so far, even taking into account themselves, and he definitely was not human.

_Are we human?_ Jack thought. Probably not - was this Dream Man like them? He didn't seem to have noticed them hovering below him, too busy concentrating on his magic dust. He waved his hands in the air like a conductor, directing the golden streams.

Jack's heart began to sink. So did the temperature.

Were they invisible to the man, too?

The Dream Man was retracting the streams, absorbing them into his cloud. As they watched - Jack impressed, despite the heavy thoughts - the little man shaped the cloud into...a fish? A creature wide and flat, with a long tail and two antennae. The fish thing began to steer away with the Dream Man at the helm. He was almost out of sight when he turned, winked and waved.

The pair blinked, glancing about. No one else in the sky but them.

He'd waved. _At them._

He'd seen them.

_He sees us._

Stunned, the siblings stared after him for a long minute until he could no longer be seen among the clouds.

It was Faith who acted first.

"Wait! _Wait!_" she yelled - her lungs were surprisingly strong. She grabbed a chunk of Jack's hair and dug her heels into his sides, shocking him back to himself. "Jack, go _after_ him!"

Jack shook himself. "R-right!" He tensed and released himself like a spring, shooting off after the man. The traces of gold dust were fading, fading, gone, but Jack just propelled himself faster faster faster after the man - the only one who hadn't looked straight through them - faster faster faster -

He was gone.

They were higher than they'd flown before, the clouds stretching away beneath them like an endless, grey ocean. The Dream Man was nowhere to be seen. Faith and Jack were quiet for a moment.

"He saw us," Faith whispered. Jack nodded slowly, a light flickering to life behind his eyes as hope stretched his mouth into a grin. He whooped, punching a fist into the air and backflipping in the air with Faith shrieking in delight on his back.

**_We're not alone!_**

* * *

**~ROTG~**

* * *

**A/N:** I'm sorry that this reads so stiffly. I haven't written in too long - I'm getting rusty. Which is entirely my own fault. I would have had dream dolphins for Jack instead, but I figured that - it being the early 1700s - Jack wouldn't know about dolphins. Or manta rays.

Speaking of, I did some Googling into the history of ice skates. I'd thought that maybe it was a historical inaccuracy for Jack and his sister to have metal-bladed ice skates, but apparently metal-bladed ice skates were invented by the Dutch in about the 1500s. I'm no history expert but I looked closely at Jack and his sister's skates in the film and I think they look fairly accurate for the time they're from.

**Guest:** Thank you! This story does stick to the basic timeline of the film, but with a few changes. I will explore some of the moments of the film, featuring Faith, in some drabbles.

Constructive criticism is welcome, as always.


	5. treasures untold: part 1

**A/N:** Wow, two drabbles in one day. This one took barely any time at all...though, granted, it's shorter than the others so far.

From now on, I throw any sense of a coherent timeline out of the window. The order of the drabbles is all mixed up. This skips forward from the colonial times quite a bit.

Also: finally! Faith gets some spotlight.

* * *

**treasures untold: part 1**

**little secrets**

* * *

_It's so tiny,_ she thought, perched on the barren flower box outside of the little boy's window. She had her hands against the glass, frosting it over, looking at the little tooth which lay forgotten on the coffee table as the boy - a few years older than her (in appearance, anyway) - gawked at an episode of _Doctor Who_ on his family's black-and-white television. The titular old man and his friends were running through a forest to a farmhouse, but Faith wasn't paying much attention to that.

So tiny but such a big deal, Faith Frost knew - she and her brother had heard the stories of the Tooth Fairy, seen her tiny workers (her '_Baby Teeth_', as Jack had nicknamed them), like little hummingbirds, flitting through windows with coins and leaving with molars and incisors.

_Who_ they took them to was obvious. _Where_ was a mystery, though Jack and Faith had tried (multiple times) to follow them (the fairies had shaken the siblings off of their tails every time). _Why_, Faith had no idea.

Were they valuable? Faith pressed her nose to the glass, squinting as if that would make the tooth look different. No change. It just looked like a tooth, slightly yellowed from teas and fizzy pop. Still, Faith found herself rapt.

The door opened as the final credits began to roll and the boy's mother entered. Her short conversation with the boy was muffled by the glass - Faith caught something about the boy's bedtime. The mother noticed the tooth on the table and moved closer to the window, picking it up and brandishing it to the boy, who made a face.

"_If you don't put it under your pillow, the Tooth Fairy won't come._"

"_Mu-um, that's dumb. No one believes in the Tooth fairy any more!_"

Faith felt a stab of indignation for the spirit she'd never met, shooting the boy a sharp glare that - of course - went straight over his head. The mother just sighed, gave up and dropped the tooth in the bin before following the boy upstairs.

An insane idea gripped Faith.

She waited for a few seconds to ensure that the boy and his mom weren't coming back in. Nervous, fingers trembling, Faith glances around before prising the old-fashioned window open. It took longer than she wanted it to - luckily the latch had been left open, but the glass and wood was _heavy_.

_Jack could lift it,_ Faith thought, and pushed harder.

She managed to create space enough to slip through; holding her breath, she ducked under, landing nimbly on her bare feet (her skates were tied together by the laces and draped over the back of her neck).

The window landed closed again with an ear-shattering _bang!_ that threatened to knock Faith over.

Faith froze.

A beat of tense silence.

The stairs began to creak under the weight of footsteps.

"_Blasted wind..._"

Faith's heart stuttered. She stuck her hand into the bin and grabbed the tooth - pausing only to ascertain that it was the tooth she'd grabbed - and rocketed out of the living room, breezing past the mother in the hallway (who shivered and grabbed her arms) and yanking open the front door and sprinting down down down the street and she didn't stop, she didn't _dare_ stop until she was around the corner and out of sight of the house.

She halted to catch her breath, a habit she didn't need. After a moment she looked at the tooth in her hand. _I did it,_ she thought, her mood lifting as she raised the tooth to catch the light of the streetlamp. Again, she speculated in her mind - why was it such a precious thing? Maybe she could find out from it, if she looked hard enough. No one would miss it, right? The boy definitely wouldn't...

A gust of wind announced Jack's return. Faith stuffed the tooth into her pocket before he strolled into the pool of light cast by the streetlamp, arms hooked around the staff which rested against his neck. Jack grinned, then produced two store-made muffins from the pocket of his hooded jacket.

"Hey, pipsqueak. Hungry?"

Faith nodded, though of course she wasn't. She and Jack hadn't needed food for two hundred and fifty years.

"Hey, whatcha got there?" Jack tilted his head to the side, and Faith was suddenly aware that she'd been subconsciously patting her pocket.

She stilled her hand, smiling with a hint of embarrassment. "Nothing. Is it chocolate?"

Jack's eyebrows pulled together but he didn't push the subject, handing her the muffin. "'Course. What kind of brother would I be if it wasn't?"

Faith couldn't respond around a mouthful of muffin, but that was okay - her mind was on other things, lingering on the tiny package of enamel and pulp tucked away in her clothes.

_What secrets are you hiding?_

* * *

**~ROTG~**


	6. raison d'être

**A/N:** Bumped up the rating. I'm paranoid. Plus, I might end up touching on some angsty and possibly adult-ish themes in this series. I officially give up any pretense that these count as drabbles, or attempts at adhering to a word limit.

_Let's do the time warp again ~_

* * *

**raison d'être**

* * *

Winter came, as it is wont to do.

It came to the little colonial village of Burgess as it had the last ten lonely years: bitter, unforgiving. The snow and winds made Faith and Jack feel more at home, but would chase shivering families indoors and crease the faces of parents as they worried over food and shelter and whether their fragile babies would survive the next frozen night.

It was enough to give the Frosts a guilt complex.

What did it matter that a snowdrift felt like blankets to them, when for a human to be buried in one was a death sentence? What good did their powers over ice do, when it withered crops and froze livestock? It wasn't their fault - they didn't _choose_ these abilities, they never _intentionally_ caused villagers harm - but even entering Burgess felt like a terrible deed, every step heavy, as if they were carrying death on their backs.

Sometimes, a child or two would brave the cold weather to play in the snow. Usually, that was the most company that Jack and Faith got every year, though the children were unaware of them; even then they were careful to keep their distance, fearful of what havoc they might wreak if they got too close.

Today, the children were skating on the lake.

Jack watched from a tree branch a few metres away with Faith resting on his lap, amused by the children gliding across the frozen surface of the water but trying to ignore a nagging sense of unease. They recognised all three children, of course: Joshua, Mercy and Seth. They'd spent enough time in Burgess to have learnt some names.

Joshua had put up some resistance when Mercy and Seth tried to drag him onto the lake with them.

"Mother said to stay away from the lake," he'd said quietly, biting his lip. He reminded Jack of Faith when he did that. "She says it's dangerous."

"'_Mother said, mother said,_'" Mercy mocked with a put-on lisp. "Come _on_, Josha, don't be such a baby."

"I'm not!" he'd snapped. "I just think -"

"Then stop thinking," Seth said. He was already skating in lazy circles on the ice. "You know what _my_ mama says? Says we shouldn't think so much. Says we should concentrate on growing strong so we can be good workers when we grow and look after each other."

"But we've got to think to talk to God -"

"_Please_, Joshua?" Mercy fluttered her eyelashes. She had big doe eyes, the persuasive sort; the siblings saw Joshua's resolve waver. "For me?"

In the end, Joshua was persuaded onto the ice. He even cracked a smile as Mercy grabbed his hand, dragging him with her as she traced figure-eights on the lake. Faith leaned forward in Jack's lap - he felt her jostling as she fought the desire to join them, to put her ice skates to use. She'd grown extremely talented with them, to the point where she could easily stand on them without teetering as if they were ordinary shoes. Jack kept her pinned to him with the staff, though. And still he couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong.

Faith, as always, noticed the shift in his emotions; she twisted around in Jack's lap, looking at him with concern. "What -"

She didn't get a chance to finish the question.

The ice groaned, cracks spiderwebbing out from beneath where Mercy and Joshua had slid to a stop. Seth, who'd been sitting on the snowy bank, scuttled back on his hands and heels with a cry like a frightened baby; Mercy and Joshua's breath hitched and they clutched each other in a spike of panic. The shift of weight made the ice crumble faster. Mercy and Joshua blanched.

_Darkness..._

Jack barely registered how Faith had stiffened in his lap. The air was sucked out of his chest.

_...dark...cold…_

The surface crackled again. Mercy shrieked.

_...scared..._

Afterwards, neither Jack nor Faith were sure who made the first move - it was instinctual, an unspoken plan forming between them as the frost forms under their fingers. It propelled them both off of the tree and across to the lake, the wind at their backs. Jack released Faith moments before they hit the icy surface. She landed perfectly on her skates, zipping forward across where the children had been moments before; in the wake of her skates, the ice thickened and sealed. The children had been swept onto thicker ice by a gust of snowy wind kicked up by Jack's staff.

It was over in a heartbeat. Then it was still.

Mercy began to cry. Joshua put his head between his knees and shook violently.

"**_JOSHUA THADDEUS OVERLAND!_**"

Joshua snapped his head up, as did Mercy, Seth, Jack and Faith. The bellowing voice belonged to a broad-shouldered, broad-necked, broad-chested, broad-_everythinged_ man with thick, roping muscles, leftover streaks of brown in his grey hair and a look of utmost fury on his leathery face. He dumped two armfuls of firewood on the snow next to him and loped towards them, mighty fists swinging beside him.

"**_YOU GET OFF THAT ICE RIGHT NOW._**"

Even whiter than before, Joshua scrambled off of the ice; he didn't reach the edge before his father reached out a long arm and hoisted him up into the air by the scruff of his neck. Mercy and Seth were in the process of hot footing it as fast as humanly possible.

"_What in the Lord's name were you **thinking**, boy?! Skating onto thin… **How would your mother react?**_"

"I - I'm sorry -"

The man began dragging Joshua back to the village by the ear, scolding him viciously as the boy attempted to stammer something about an angel of God and a miracle rescue. Faith and Jack watched them walk away, Jack's hand on Faith's shoulder. The snow swirled gently around their feet.

"His father was really worried," Faith whispered. Jack realised she was trembling slightly and pulled her against him.

"Yeah."

"He almost died."

"But he _didn't_," Jack said, squeezing her shoulder.

"Because we saved him." Faith's eyes began to sparkle. "We're heroes."

"Heroes," Jack repeated. He liked the sound of that. _Heroes._ Guardian angels, like Joshua said.

And then he thought, _who said winter has to be dangerous?_

.

.

.

.

There was not another winter death at the Burgess lake for decades.

* * *

**~ROTG~**

* * *

**A/N:** Psst. Hey. Guys. Don't you think the review box is the perfect place to put constructive criticism? Especially for someone who really needs it. Like me. Particularly when it comes to building up tension in a scene. You know you want to, lovely readership ~


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